


but let's not talk of love or chains

by Crowmunculus



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Series, Reunion, Slow Burn, Trauma Recovery, everyone is sad and has PTSD, extended bird metaphors, novels canon, questionable geographic worldbuilding, they love each other but Nezumi is really bad at it, world's slowest writer award
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2017-12-25 23:27:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowmunculus/pseuds/Crowmunculus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nezumi promised Shion they would reunite. He never said when, or how long he would stay. Five years later, he’s still figuring that out himself. Nezumi returns before he’s ready and finds that Shion has grown up without him – but for some reason, Shion still welcomes him back.</p><p>In which Nezumi is forced to reconcile his conflicting fear and love, the pain in his past and the uncertainty of his future, and decide if freedom is worth the price of belonging nowhere at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. in city and in forest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> update July 2017: Some of the writing in this fic is from as far back as 2012. I will be going back to edit this chapter at some point but right now I’m focusing on getting chapter 3 out. I also changed my mind about this fic’s plot – No. 6 Beyond who? Don’t know her. Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen. Maybe I’ll write about The New Conflict introduced in Beyond someday, but not in this fic – the conflict here is entirely driven by Nezumi and Shion’s relationship and Nezumi’s abysmal interpersonal skills (or lack thereof.) 
> 
> In which Nezumi is forced to confront his core beliefs about love and freedom and reevaluate the role of fear as his primary motivator, featuring: flowery romantic prose right next to gory body horror, lots of introspection about childhood trauma and the nature of attachments, and an overabundance of extended metaphors. Warnings for each chapter will be listed individually. 
> 
> WARNINGS FOR PART I: vague allusions to sexual violence; graphic descriptions of gore and body horror in the final scene

part i  
_in city and in forest_

prolog  
  
.   .   .  
  
He’s read through some religious texts. The old abandoned library store room had a few major books when Nezumi and the old woman first moved in, and he added more over time as he found them scattered across the ramshackle marketplaces of the West Block. He’d liked the old worn Bible for its aesthetic value: gold leaf on the edges of the tissue-thin pages, a thick red leather cover, a navy blue silk thread tassel for a bookmark.

It wasn’t that it was dense – though it was – and it wasn’t beyond his level of understanding. Nezumi never finished the Old Testament because he read to Sodom and Gomorrah and could no longer believe in a God, even for the sake of make-believe: the Mao Village was far from Sodom and the city’s soldiers were anything but angels, but the forest and the people burned all the same.

But Lot’s wife turned back and was struck dead on the spot, her body became a pillar of salt. There’s punishment for those who look back. And Nezumi wasn’t turned to a pillar of salt, and he didn’t die, but he saw, and his punishment was seeing.

_At least you, at least you must survive..._

The price of looking back is memory. Nezumi keeps his memories in the thick scars like worn leather stretched out across his back. He will have these scars for as long as he is alive and for as long as he is alive, he will remember. He’ll remember all of it.

It’s not the fire he should fear, he tells himself. He should fear people. It wasn’t an act of God, it wasn’t the work of angels that smote Mao to a barren field of bone and ash, it was the will of man, and when Nezumi turned away from humanity and human warmth _he did not look back._

He’s reminded of a poem by an American[1], written before the last great war. It’s not prophetic, no more than anything else, but it asks about the End and it asks: fire or ice.

Nezumi knows what it’s like to watch his world end in fire.

He resigns himself to ice. It’s said that when you freeze to death, right before you die, you stop feeling cold, you stop feeling numb, you feel a false warmth and you grow tired and you fall asleep in that warmth and comfort and never wake up again. And so he thinks, as long as I can’t feel it, I’m safe. The cold means I’m still alive.

_And as long as I am alive, I will remember._

.   .   .

“Whoever lives wins. Don’t feel guilty about having survived. If you have time to be feeling guilty, work on living a day longer, a minute longer. And once in a while, remember the ones that died before you. That’s good enough.”

“Are you saying that to me?” Shion questioned.

“Who else could I be talking to?”

“It sounded like - ” Shion hesitated. “Almost like you were telling it to yourself...”

                - _No. 6 volume 1, chapter 4_ ( _translated by[9 th Ave](http://9th-ave.blogspot.com/)_)

 .   .   .

   
“Did he mourn?”

“What?” Nezumi asked from the other end of the room. Shion did this sometimes, he’d ask spontaneous questions like this as if Nezumi could possibly know the context.

“Lot, in the Bible. When his wife died, did he mourn?”

Nezumi was thankful that Shion was buried somewhere in the rows and stacks of books and could not see his face. “How would I know?” he said, and masked his unease with a sneer. Shion was always like this, always asking impossible questions like this, like Nezumi knew all the answers. “I wasn’t there.”

And maybe Shion really needed to be told that – he seemed to think that Nezumi knew everything, had seen everything. It was annoying.

“Well, I assumed you’ve already read it, and thought that maybe you would know.”

Shion stood up in a rustle of cloth and the sound of his footsteps drew near. Nezumi bit back a sigh behind bared teeth and tried to hide himself in his book - _East of Eden_ , appropriately enough, and now he’d irrevocably lost his place. He held it up to his face as a shield and pretended to read anyway.

“But what about you? What do you think, Nezumi?”

Did it matter what Nezumi thought? Nezumi’s thoughts on the subject wouldn’t change what had been written, and were the story real, Nezumi’s opinion could do nothing to reverse the firestorm and the staggering loss of life.

But Shion emerged from the bookshelves he’d painstakingly, lovingly organized, and he sat on the old chair across from Nezumi on the bed, and his eyes were wide and trusting and to him it _did_ matter what Nezumi thought.

Shion was dangerous. Nezumi was used to people – men, usually, filthy and drunken and handsy – idolizing Eve, but never Nezumi. Nezumi was a gutter rat, cutthroat loner, untrustworthy spiteful  piece of shit who knew how to use a knife and how to hold a grudge. But Shion, wide-eyed, city-boy Shion saw him as _Nezumi_ , and he saw _Nezumi_ as some kind of ideal. He was too caught up in the color of Nezumi’s eyes to see the blade at his own throat.

Nezumi answered anyway. He knew he shouldn’t, but he acted on impulse before he could stop himself, and this was exactly why Shion was dangerous. He said, “Why would he? He sure didn’t show any sympathy toward his daughters when he offered them up to those animals at the door, why would Lot feel any sadness for his wife?”

Shion carefully marked his page with the blue tassel and closed the book, and ran his thumb along the gold leaf of the pages. He would probably not open it again. He set the book down out of order on the nearest shelf and hesitated, then looked back at Nezumi and admitted, “I don’t think he was a righteous man.”

“Careful, Shion. You’re saying you’re a better judge of character than God? That’s blasphemy.” Nezumi smirked, and it was fake, but Shion would never know the difference. This, he knew, this he could deal with, dismiss Shion’s words as the ramblings of a fool and kill the subject before it tread any farther onto dangerous ground. He continued to pretend-read his book, eyes tracing over the same lines again and again but registering none of it; he’d lost his taste for religious allegory entirely, at least for the evening.

But Shion had his x-ray eyes and he saw through the book and he saw through Nezumi and he said, “I’m serious, I don’t understand how being willing to hurt his daughters like that proves that Lot is righteous. What kind of God would be okay with sparing anyone at the cost of making others suffer?”

_East of Eden_ dropped unceremoniously against the pillow, his page lost forever. It took Nezumi a considerable amount of effort to not throw it. Shion just couldn’t let things be, he had to pick and pick and _pick_ at things that should just stay buried and Nezumi’s scars still itched and burned sometimes like they were fresh because he’d never really healed. “What would you do then, His Almighty Shion?” he spat and the words were bitter, laced with malice and newly unearthed hurt.

His cruelty went unnoticed. Undeterred, Shion caught his glare with those unbearably kind (naive, foolish, _foolish_ ) eyes bright and he said, “If I were in Lot’s position, I’d offer myself.”

“Just pretty words.” Nezumi looked away. The honesty in those eyes was unbearable. It made his skin crawl. “What makes you think you’d be so selfless when your life is on the line? You’re only human. You’d want to survive.”

_Drop it. Stop talking. You don’t even know what you’re saying, Shion. Be quiet. Don’t talk about it, don’t drag it into this room._

Shion still was calm and all soft edges, everything Nezumi was not, especially now. All the tension in the air passed right over Shion’s head like a boat skimmed across the surface of a lake. “It wouldn’t be easy,” Shion said. “I’d be afraid. I wouldn’t do it because I’d _want_ to, I’d do it because I’d _have_ to. If they were after someone I cared about...if they wanted to hurt you, Nezumi, I’d offer myself in your place. And that’s not even righteousness, that’s just – that’s what you do, when you love someone. You protect them.”

Nezumi stood up, stalked across the room – ignoring Shion and his sickening vulnerability and the concerned words that Nezumi missed in his haste – opened the door and slammed it shut behind himself and leapt up the stairs two at a time and broke into a run. It was raining; he didn’t care. He was a mess of nerves and anger and old, old memories and he ran blind in the night as far away from Shion as possible –

Because Shion was telling the truth, and this was why he was dangerous. He was a sheltered, stupid fool, he had no grasp of, couldn’t even begin to understand the reality of the situation, that it was something that could happen in the West Block. He would offer himself up and he’d be torn apart and Nezumi would feel Shion’s pain as if it were his own. (I’m sorry, he thinks to his memory of the old woman, I’m sorry I couldn’t do what you told me to do. I’m too weak. I’m sorry.)

_“What do you think, Nezumi?”_

What would he do if it was Shion _they_ were after? (The nebulous _They_ – everyone, everything, because when you are a prey animal you live your life by the gospel of fear.) Could he throw Shion to the wolves, knowing full well what they would do to him?

Of course not. Nezumi knew what men do to you when you’re young and helpless and alone. Shion wouldn’t make it. Even if he survived, it would kill him, and Nezumi would have the rest of his life to remember.

(I should be used to this by now, what’s one more loss? he told himself. But one more loss could break him because he never recovered from everything else – _everything_ he’s lost, everything taken from him. Sometimes the enormity of it falls on him all at once an avalanche and he struggles just to breathe beneath the ice and snow knowing he is alive at the cost of everyone else, he is alone and he must carry the suffering of his dead alone. Sometimes he thinks he’d rather be a pillar of salt; sometimes he thinks surviving is the worst punishment. Sometimes he thinks surviving is the worst thing that ever happened to him.)

He’d already lost. Shion ruined him.

Breathless from running so fast through the heavy mud, Nezumi slowed his desperate sprint to a walk, to a stubborn slogging crawl, and then finally an exhausted stop. If the rain kept up this way it would bring death to the West Block along the low-lying path of the flooded river.

His blood rushed in his ears like the rain, like the river, frenzied, overflowing, roaring in staccato time with his fiercely pounding heart. He was at the summit of a hill overlooking the top of the demon city No. 6’s fortress walls. He hadn’t meant to go there, he hadn’t meant to go anywhere but _away_ , and wasn’t that just the worst of clichés?

His veins thrummed with restless energy, his closed fists clenched and unclenched uselessly. Anger grew and built as tension in the muscles of Nezumi’s shoulders and down his legs and arms and settled like sickness at the back of his throat and the base of his stomach. For every light he saw lit beyond the city wall, there was a person, or a family.

Because what no one ever talks about, when they talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, is that there were _children_ there.

Nezumi looked upward to the blackened sky and screamed. All of the hate, all of the hurt, all of the anger and loss and everything he carried and suffered in silence screamed out into the clamor of the storm, one small voice against the howling of the wind, one lone mournful voice lost amongst the rain.

Was this how Shion felt on the day of the typhoon? This frantic electricity running underneath his skin, the wordless instinctive knowledge that something was wrong, something inside him was broken but he didn’t know what or how to fix it. Would he feel like this forever, was this the entire rest of his life? He’d been so angry for so long.

Nezumi screamed until his throat burned raw and his voice stuttered out with his breath, but all the anger was still there boiling just below the surface, like a poison; maybe he would never leach it fully from his blood, maybe it was a toxin and it ruined all the rest of him until all that was left was anger and hurt.

When I destroy No. 6, he thought. When I shred it apart with my own claws and teeth. Then, then – this will all leave, this will all wash away.

But for now, there was no grand epiphany, no dramatic flash of lightning and moment of sudden clarity. The storm continued on, No. 6 continued on, the world continued on. He was just a stupid little boy standing alone in the dark and freezing rain like it would do him any good. All that came of this childish stunt was his clothes were soaked through and he was cold.

He stood immobilized on the hilltop under the weight of the rain, too drained to move, hands numb from the cold. And he knew that cold was as cruel a killer as fire, that there were those in the slums who would freeze to death, if not tonight, then the next, when the river overwhelmed its banks and flooded them out of their homes, when the frosts came and claimed all it touched and entombed in ice. Nezumi had four walls to return to, he had a furnace for heat and the insulation of hard-packed dirt and clay surrounding his underground room. He was of the lucky ones, he knew. All he had to do was return to the old library store room and this cold could do nothing to harm him. But he could not move – not yet. And maybe this was arrogance, but Nezumi had never been a humble creature. ‘Arrogance’ was a kinder word than the alternative.

When the moment passed, when he could move again, Nezumi turned away from the lights of the city and descended back into the barren outskirts of the slums. Something close to shame coiled at the base of his spine where his scars began and clawed across the skin of his lower back like a brand. Embarrassment, he realized. He’d acted like a bratty child, like an idiot, like every accusation he leveled so unfairly at Shion.

His upper lip curled back. Shion would want an explanation, and Nezumi didn’t have one. Shion would ask questions, he’d make assumptions, he might pick at the wound until he found something dangerously close to the truth. It shouldn’t bother Nezumi, whatever Shion might think of him, but dammit, it did.

He didn’t want to think about Shion. Nezumi concentrated instead of the sound of the rain, the knife’s edge of the wind against his frigid skin, the muffled noise of his footsteps tracking through the mud. This brought him halfway back before the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck prickled and then he heard –

“Nezumi! There you are, I’ve been looking for you!”

Of course you have, he thought, you can’t just leave well enough alone. What he said was, “You shouldn’t have bothered. I’m not stupid, I wasn’t lost. I don’t need you to come pick me up.”

It was dark with no moon or stars and too wet for a lantern, so he did not see Shion clearly until he jogged closer: he was wearing Nezumi’s jacket over his cardigan and the superfibre cloak over that. “I know,” Shion said, “But it’s raining so hard, and you weren’t wearing a coat...I didn’t want you to catch a cold, so I brought your superfibre and jacket out for you, but then I couldn’t find you...”

_I didn’t want to be found_. “Idiot,” Nezumi said on reflex. He was too tired to be properly angry. “I’m not that fragile.”

Shion only blinked at him and cocked his head to the side, curious, confused, like one of Inukashi’s goddamn dogs, and began to pull the cloak off over his shoulders. “ _Shion_ ,” Nezumi said, almost sighed, “Seriously, don’t worry about it. I’m already soaked through, you might as well keep wearing it and stay dry.”

Shion scowled – closer to a pout, really – but let go of the cloak and let it settle back over his frame. “What was the point of me coming out here, then?”

“Not my problem. You’re the one who chose to do it.” Nezumi started walking again, and Shion trailed behind, matching his pace.

For a blessed, quiet moment, it seemed like Shion would not bring it up, but then, of course, he asked, “Why did you run outside like that? Are you okay?”

Well, that was a loaded question. “You were annoying me,” Nezumi said without looking at him. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the full truth either. “I was trying to read and you wouldn’t shut up, so I left to get some fresh air and a break from your pointless airheaded babbling. That’s all.”

“Nezumi, you’re wearing slippers.”

Nezumi glanced down at his feet – he was, and they were spectacularly ruined by mud at that point. “You really pissed me off. I wasn’t thinking too hard about appropriate rain attire, as you’ve already noticed.”

“Don’t be so defensive. And I wasn’t being _that_ annoying.”

“You’ve obviously never listened to yourself talk. Also, you can’t actually get sick from being out in the cold, that’s just a myth. I would have thought you would know better, Advanced Track.”

Shion scowled at him again, but not unkindly. “Because No. 6 is such a reliable source of information,” he said, so exaggeratedly sincere that Nezumi couldn’t fight back his laughter, unfettered and genuine.

“Touché, Shion. Well played.”

And Shion smiled at him, and it shouldn’t have made Nezumi smile back, but he did, and something unfamiliar in his chest constricted tight enough to hurt.

They arrived back home shortly after. Shion did not bring up Nezumi’s sudden disappearing stunt again, either satisfied with Nezumi’s half-assed excuse, or simply by now accustomed to the dramatic vicissitudes of his roommate’s temper. For whatever reason, Nezumi was relieved. If Shion saw that side of him, if Shion caught him vulnerable from wounds that ran deeper than skin deep, it would be too late, they’d become too attached, they’d destroy themselves. This wall between them was only for the best.

But sometimes –

Shion pulled the superfibre off over his head in the hall before opening the door to their room. He turned away from Nezumi and shook the water out of the cloak the best he was able. Water that had pooled in the folds of the fabric slid effortlessly off the waterproofing and flew off with Shion’s vigorous shaking and speckled the walls, flickered the flames of the lanterns that lined the hallway. It had served its purpose: Shion was mostly dry, save for mud caked halfway up his shins and rainwater on his hair and face from the sideways force of the wind. Good, Nezumi thought. Shion shouldn’t have to be wet and miserable because of him.

Shion turned back to look at him expectantly. “What?” Nezumi said. “Don’t tell me you locked us out. I don’t have a key on me.”

“No! I um, I didn’t think to lock it,” Shion admitted, then added quickly, “But that’s not the point. The point is, you’ll drip on everything.”

“Shion. I am not stripping in the hallway.”

“Picky, picky. Just the slippers, then.”

“When did you become the boss of me?” Nezumi griped, but obediently kicked the trashed slippers off regardless. Shion had a good point: they were something of a lost cause.

“When we started sharing a room. You’re terrible at picking up after yourself. You’d still be living in squalor if I wasn’t around to keep the place clean.”

Nezumi scoffed. “ _Squalor_. At least your vocabulary has improved.”

Slippers from the Black Lagoon no longer an imminent threat, Shion unlocked the door and Nezumi followed him inside. Shion’s back to him, Nezumi noticed the awkward fit of the jacket: loose over his skinny too-narrow shoulders enough to be comical, sleeves covering his hands to his fingertips. The sight evoked... _something_ , some upwelling of soft emotions for which Nezumi did not yet have a name. Something close to security, safety, the warm rush of air from the heater that greeted them as they crossed the threshold together into their home.

His chest hurt again, like the _something_ was trapped within the skeletal prison of his ribcage and it strained against him to be freed; if he surrendered to it, if he let it escape, it would break him open down along the vertical line of his sternum, it would go tearing through the delicate tissue of his heart and lungs on the way out. If Nezumi let it, the feeling would shred him apart.

Shion shrugged the jacket off along his arms and offered it to Nezumi with a sheepish smile. “It doesn’t fit yet.”

“Yet?”

“I’m still growing.”

“You tell yourself that.” He took the jacket and hung it haphazardly over the back of the old high-backed chair, and said “I’m taking a shower. Don’t expect for any hot water to be left over.”

“I never do. You _never_ leave any hot water. That’s another bad habit you need to work on, Nezumi!”

“Yeah, yeah, complain complain. I someday aspire to meet Your Majesty’s high standards of appropriate roommate conduct, but alas, today is not that day.” He wasn’t looking, but Nezumi practically _felt_ Shion roll his eyes at his back before he shut the bathroom door behind him.

Even the lukewarm water burned his skin at first. Nezumi ran cool water from the bathtub faucet over his numb hands until his fingers protested in sharp explosions of pins-and-needles, then slowly increased the temperature as tolerance built. He began to shiver – good, he should not have allowed himself to reach the point where he stopped.

True to form, Nezumi stood beneath the spray of warm water for as long as the water was warm. Afterward, he was still shivering, still cold, as if the rain hadn’t only chilled his skin and bones but also drowned his capacity to feel warmth.

Belatedly, he realized he’d neglected to bring a set of dry clothes into the bathroom with him. Nothing short of a house fire would get him back into the soggy pajamas he’d relegated to the corner opposite the bath, so Nezumi wrapped a towel securely around his waist and risked it. He opened the door a crack and saw that the room was dark, Shion had already put out the lamps and gone to bed.

Nezumi extinguished the bathroom light and both rooms plunged into the complete darkness only possible underground. Even nocturnal creatures such as Nezumi could not see when there was absolutely zero light, but he knew the layout of his room so well he did not need sight to navigate. He opened the door fully and stepped out –

\- and almost tripped over a pile of something at his feet and fell face-first onto the floor. (He caught himself at the last minute, of course.) “What the _fuck_ ,” he mumbled under his breath and crouched down and swept out an arm to find what had tripped him: a haphazard stack of sleep clothes that likely had once been carefully folded, placed beside the door where Nezumi could find them.

There it was again, that soft feeling, sentimental and cloying. It was dark, and Nezumi allowed himself a gentle smile, because only the dark would know.

He ditched the towel and changed into the dry clothes, but it was not until Nezumi padded barefoot to the bed and clambered over Shion and slid under the blankets to lay down at Shion’s side that warmth returned to his frozen limbs. Nezumi’s back to the wall and Shion’s back to him, Nezumi felt... _safe_ , or at least something close. Nothing else, no one else in the world made him feel like this, like if he relaxed into the soft bedding of his nest, if he closed his eyes to all the reasons why he should not and fell asleep defenseless with another warm living being in his bed, maybe when he woke up, everything would be okay, the nightmare of the past twelve years would melt away with the coming of the dawn and all the rest of his life would be nothing but this, security and warmth and the steady rise and fall of Shion’s chest.

An illusion, he knew. No. 6 would still be there in the morning, and Mao would still be gone. Shion was still dangerous. But in the dark, in their warm bed, it was easy to pretend, for at least a little while, that this could be forever.

“Are you awake?” he asked in a hushed whisper. As expected, no response. Shion slept the dead-man’s sleep of one who knew nothing of true fear. And that was good, Shion should never have to sleep lightly for fear of death or pain, and Nezumi did not wish to take that from him. He shifted closer until the fronts of his legs tucked behind the backs of Shion’s, and all of his front curled around the arch of Shion’s back. He crept an arm over the dip of Shion’s waist and let it rest there on top of him, and he leaned his nose into the downy hairs at the back of Shion’s neck and breathed in a shivery sigh. He knew he shouldn’t, but...

\- sometimes Nezumi thinks destruction might not be too bad, if it meant he was no longer so alone, and this was exactly, _exactly_ what made Shion dangerous.

I’m leaving anyway, he told himself. After I’ve destroyed No. 6. I’ll leave this place and I’ll be free. For now, I can indulge myself in this warmth, in the comfort of his presence. For now.

Until then. Only until then.

.   .   .

  
But time passed, and those halcyon days were lost to the passage of time. Nezumi mourned the loss as he mourned any other: he buried the hurt beneath his anger and underground, it festered, it became a cancer, it ate him from the inside out.

The ghosts of Mao haunted him still in his dreams and in his songs. So in the transport cars, Nezumi sang. He sang for all the things about to meet their end, for the lives of the people in the car, for the death of his simple life together with Shion.

A song won’t save anyone. He can’t save these people, his hands are full enough keeping Shion alive, keeping himself alive. Nezumi sang in elegy, in apology. He sang as a salve for his own conscience, which stubbornly refused to die. Inukashi was wrong - he wasn’t a demon, not really. Were he a demon, this wouldn’t hurt _so much._

He sang to the people of green fields and rivers. He sang about a lost paradise, a world long departed, a world only real for himself. To the others there, his words spun a fairy-tale. This would never be real for them. They had never seen the forest or the mountains and now they never would. So Nezumi sang.

(It’s not enough, it’s not enough.) [2]

Surviving is the worst punishment, memory is the heaviest burden. He tried to not feel it. He tried to close himself off, but he really wasn’t a demon, he still possessed his human heart. Shion reminded him of that. Shion kept him human, and to be human is to feel pain. So he swallowed all his hurt, he harvested the hurt of everyone around him and planted it within himself so that it would grow.

Soon, he thought. Soon I will kill the demon city and I will kill it in your memory, I’ll carve your names into the rubble and then you can rest, then we can all rest. I can’t save you. I can’t mourn for you – if I let myself feel it, it would kill me. But I can sing for you, and I can kill for you, and I will lay you to rest with my own ghosts. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Shion did not know what came next. Nezumi clutched him close and focused on his heartbeat – no matter what, he would keep this heart – just this one – alive. Shion he could save. Shion, he _must_ save.

I’m sorry, Nezumi thought. The words sat heavy in the back of his throat, unspoken. Like a prayer: I’m sorry. Empty words that solved nothing, he knew, but still they bubbled up and stuck like thorns on his tongue. Of all his sins, this was the most vile.

Shion was still soft. Life in the West Block had roughened his edges and wicked the fat from his bones but it had yet to reach his eyes. The Correctional Facility would rend through him like a forest fire, burn him into nothing but the smoke from a furnace.

Nezumi knew what came next.

“We’re going to hell together.”

Shion didn’t even know what ‘hell’ meant, but soon, he would, and it would be all Nezumi’s fault. What a terrible way to repay a debt.

Shion was warm as always. Living people are warm. (Maybe Nezumi has been dead for a long time.) Nezumi held him close and indulged in that closeness one last time, and promised with his life to keep Shion warm and alive.

.   .   .

   
The Correctional Facility ends in fire, too.

Shion carried him out of the fire. “It’s okay, you’re going to be okay, just hold on,” he said. Shion spoke nonstop in a steady, soothing murmur like moving water over his wounds. His knees trembled under Nezumi’s weight.

“Don’t worry about me,” Nezumi rasped. “Save yourself. Leave me behind.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’d never leave you behind, never. It’s okay. We’re going to get out of here together, _alive_. Hold on.”

And it was so like Shion to carry him, after everything, after Nezumi dragged him through hell and murdered his best friend. How had Nezumi ever thought him weak? Shion had been carrying him since the night they met.

“Idiot. Clueless natural. You’ll die. We’ll both die. Leave me. At least you, at least you must survive...”

The arc of history is a circle. Nezumi cursed Shion with every foul word he knew, he slipped in and out of consciousness between insults. “Stupid. I hate you. You’re hopeless. Hate you.”

“I know,” Shion told him. “It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

Shion gently laid him down on the cold metal of the operating table. With a pair of surgical scissors he cut vertically along the line of Nezumi’s torso and cut his shirt off him and peeled away bloodstained strips of ruined fabric to flutter to the floor. When he cut again, the scissors sank shallow into his flesh and _snip, snip_ Shion sheared through the fatty layers of skin and lean abdominal muscle up to his sternum in an autopsy Y incision. Nezumi watched on in detached fascination from very far away, as if watching a play, as if it all were happening to someone else. Only dress rehearsal. Not real.

Shion sliced him open down his middle and dug both hands inside him. “It’s okay,” he said. He grasped onto something wet and soft in his gut and tugged a red tendril of viscera out the gaping hole. “It’s okay. Everything will be all right. Trust me.”

He pulled and kept pulling Nezumi’s insides out, thick bloody ropes of intestine he coiled around and around his wrist like a snake. Nezumi felt nothing, only hollow. “What’re you doing?”

“It’s okay. Trust me. It’s okay.”

The intestine came to an end and Shion unraveled it from his hand and draped it in great loops along the nearby countertop. He plunged back in and scooped out handfuls of slippery entrails: kidneys, gall bladder, stomach. Raw and dripping and himself half-dead, Nezumi could still identify them.

Nezumi remembered – he was four again, before the Massacre, he watched his mother’s elegant hands shovel the innards out a fresh-killed deer carcass and sort them in steaming piles in the red snow beside her. The deer’s deep brown eyes stared at him unblinking, and Nezumi cried as only children can for eyes that would never again see.

“My _konezumi_ , [3] don’t cry,” she told him.

But Nezumi was inconsolable. “It’s dead, it’s dead,” he sobbed. The price of living was this blood on his mother’s hands, and his own, for all that had died so he may live.

Large intestine, lungs, liver. “Hush now and listen,” she said, stern but not unkind, “Don’t cry. I will tell you a story told to me by my mother, and her mother before her, back to the Myth Times when animals lived in villages like people.” Nezumi’s crying tapered off; he sniffed and wiped his eyes and bit his lip to quiet his whimpers – he wanted to listen.

She continued: “At the end of the Myth Times, the Changer gathered a council of all the animals about to be transformed. He asked them what they wished to become when the Myth Times ended and the world was reborn, how they wished to serve the People who were to inherit the land and waters, to cherish and protect in exchange for food and shelter.”

“Deer was kind and brave. He offered his body to feed and clothe the People yet to come. He said that nursing mothers and their young were to be left alone, and he himself would run when chased, but if the rules were respected and we respect his offering by using his body well, he would return to the land every year to serve the People.”

“So, _konezumi_ , don’t cry. We are fulfilling a birthright and a promise. By respecting Deer’s gift we are respecting him” [4]

Her beautiful words tempered the ugliness of death, and his tears slowed to a final stop. He brushed his little hands along the still-warm pelt of the buck and whispered, “Thank you.”

“It’s okay,” Shion said, “It’s okay,” but there was no beauty in the blood on his hands. _My fault_ , Nezumi thought. _I’m sorry_.

The lights flickered and died, the room shook like waves, they were underwater, everything was slow and muted as it is underwater, quiet and peaceful. Shion broke his ribcage open and clawed into his beating heart, mashed it to a pulpy mess that caught under his fingernails and in the grooves of his skin. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

Shion hollowed him out completely until there was nothing left of him. Emptied him out until there was nothing left.

“Survivors are the victors, right? Are you really ready to die?”

The Correctional Facility burned, and the city would soon after. This was a victory. He’d won. What else was left?

Nezumi stood on the precipice, uncertain. If he surrendered to death, Shion would blame himself. Shion would be alone to carry the weight of the horrors witnessed and the horrors done unto him. Shion would become cold and hollow like Nezumi, the Shion who Nezumi knew would cease to exist.

“Don’t die! Open your eyes!”

Nezumi made his choice.

And then he woke up.

   
.   .   .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> endnotes: end chapter 1, ~6000 words.
> 
> [1] Fire and Ice by Robert Frost. Overused to the point of cliché, but whatever, it fit too well to ignore.
> 
> [2] Select lyrics pulled from “Sorrow” by Pink Floyd:
> 
> the sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land  
> plumes of smoke rise and merge into the leaden sky  
> a man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers  
> but awakes to a morning with no reason for waking
> 
> he’s haunted by the memory of a lost paradise  
> in his youth or a dream, he can’t be precise  
> he’s chained forever to a world that’s departed  
> it’s not enough, it’s not enough
> 
> [3] konezumi = little mouse. Nezumi was given his name by the Elder in the underground cave but shush, the idea of Nezumama using this name for him was too cute to pass up.
> 
> [4] Story adapted from a creation narrative of the Yakama Nation in Washington state, USA. Most Pacific Northwest and many other Pacific Rim indigenous cultures have stories about a Changer figure and animal-people. Later in this fic I expand on Nezumi’s heritage some more – for my purposes I’m placing the Mao people and No. 6 in the Russian/Chinese Far East, just north of Japan. I still have a lot of research to do here!
> 
> .
> 
> Finally, the title of this fic and the chapter titles are lyrics pulled from the Leonard Cohen song “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye.” It is required listening for this fic and wonderfully appropriate for the pairing – go listen to it right now!


	2. ii. they smiled like me and you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS FOR PART II: non-explicit sex

part ii  
_they smiled like me and you_

 .   .   .

But when you left, a strip of reality broke  
upon the stage through the very opening  
through which you vanished: green, true green,  
true sunshine, true forest.

-from _Death Experience_ , Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Cliff Crego)

 .   .   .

Sleeping by Nezumi’s side was the most natural, the most _right_ feeling Shion had ever known. They slept front-to-front that first night, the night of the typhoon, Shion’s hands still up the back of Nezumi’s shirt where he felt his fever-warmth and steady heartbeat between his shoulderblades. Shion used those same hands to clean the graze wound already sickly orange-red from early infection and to stitch it shut; there he first learned of the power in his hands to heal or harm, and when he placed his palms on Nezumi’s bare skin he summoned that same strength from before to try and heal the deeper wounds unreachable by physical touch alone.

Children are perceptive. He was then unaware of the old network of burns marring the skin just below his reach, but on some level, ancient and instinctive, he knew of Nezumi’s other scars, the hurt and anger festering below the surface, and he tried to heal Nezumi there, too.

When Nezumi spirited him out of No. 6 four years later and saved his life the night of the parasite wasp, Nezumi did not sleep. He remained awake at Shion’s side until the danger passed. Shion’s memories of those days were vague and half-nonsensical, a blur between fever dream and reality, but he remembered Nezumi’s uncharacteristically gentle hands and voice, he remembered cool water and he remembered the occasional weight and warmth of Nezumi on the narrow bed beside him. Nezumi later told him he’d slept on the floor those nights, but Shion knew this was not entirely true – much of what he remembered was unclear, but the clearest moments, the dearest memory was Nezumi’s arms wound around him, Nezumi’s warm sleepy breath in his ear.

There were nights Nezumi was out late and Shion fell asleep before he returned, but he was always there in the morning. Some nights Nezumi kicked him (literally) out of bed, but aside from the night of the goodbye kiss, they slept together. They _always_ slept in the same bed.

It was a constant. Nezumi laughed at Shion for planning ahead, told him nothing in the West Block was set in stone, but Shion quietly disagreed. He saw constants on the streets of the slums: hunger, fear, death, and cold. He thought of Nezumi alone and hurting for all those years: loneliness and loss. Nezumi knew those constants, accepted them as law. So Shion added one more: himself.

They always slept together, always. Even with the collapse of the wall and for all it stood, that constant remained. There was no questioning it. When they arrived at the bakery, still bloody and bruised and coated in grime and soot down to their pores, they both fell onto Shion’s old bed together still wearing their hopelessly soiled clothes. Like Nezumi’s bed in the underground room, this bed was small, but not so small it required sleeping as close together as they slept that first night. Shion reached for Nezumi, and Nezumi let him. Shion held him, and Nezumi held him back. They exchanged no words – there weren’t words yet, or it was too soon to speak them, the specter of the Correctional Facility still too heavy on their shoulders. Nezumi trembled in Shion’s arms, shook like some frail thing caught on the wind. He needed this, whatever “this” was. They both did.

Karan the next day smiled at them from the kitchen and in her smile she seemed to know some secret about them. There was question in her eyes but Shion did not know the answer. He wanted to _do things_ to Nezumi he didn’t understand, he wanted to kiss him again, deeper this time, on more than just his mouth. He wanted to run his hands and lips over Nezumi’s scars, wanted to wake up every morning for the rest of his life with Nezumi at his side.

He’d long accepted that he loved Nezumi. Shion loved Nezumi like he loved the air – Nezumi was everywhere, everything, a force of nature, the sustaining force who kept him alive.

He loved him. He was not always sure what that meant or how to classify it, but Shion loved him, wholly and unrestrained, and that was all that mattered. He didn’t need a name for what he felt because he _lived_ it.

Nezumi served him coffee the morning after. “I’m surprised you haven’t showered and used all the hot water yet,” Shion teased when Nezumi washed his mug in the sink and the water washing off his hands dripped down brown as coffee for the dirt and dried blood still on his skin.

“I can’t get my bandages wet,” Nezumi said, matter-of-fact. He took Shion’s mug and washed it too as he talked. “Seems I am once again in need of your services, doctor.”

“Presumptuous of you,” Shion said, but they both knew Shion was incapable of denying him much of anything. “Let me treat your wound.”

Nezumi was faced away, but Shion still saw his smile through the rising steam from warm dishwater.

First Shion washed his own hands and arms up to his elbows in the bathroom sink. “You’ll need to take your shirt off,” he said to Nezumi, who sat on the edge of the bathtub.

“Obviously.” Haltingly, he stripped out of his shirt with his uninjured arm, other arm held awkwardly to his chest. He winced when he peeled off the left sleeve. “It’s still sore, so be gentle.”

Shion unwrapped the bandaging across his bicep, and then across his chest, delicately hand over hand around Nezumi’s front and to his back again, and revealed the bullet entry wound below his armpit still large and horrible as when it had been fresh. It would scar, an almost-mirror of the scar further up his left shoulder. Four years later and nothing changed.

“Here, you’re picky about it so you should be the one to turn on the water and get the temperature right.”

“How well you know me.” Nezumi fiddled with the taps, and Shion watched him. And realized – how much smaller Nezumi was without his jacket and his superfibre bunched up around his throat. His shoulders weren’t as broad as Shion expected, and the bones of his spine and collar jutted out sharp from his skinny stray cat frame.

Sometimes Shion forgot how _young_ Nezumi was. How young they both were.

The metallic jangle of Nezumi undoing his belt and unzipping the fly of his cargo pants snapped Shion from his thoughts. “What are you doing?”

“In case you’ve forgotten, Your Royal Airheadedness, I have bandages on my leg, too.”

“Oh, that, that’s right – hey wait, do you really need to get naked?”

Smirking, Nezumi ignored Shion’s stuttered protests and rolled his khakis and underwear down his hips and off his legs to pile on the floor with his shirt. “I might as well take my bath now, too. You always bitch about me using all the hot water, so I’m conserving. Isn’t that thoughtful of me?” Shion occupied himself with staring at the ceiling and breathing hard through his nose, fighting down his blush and arousal. “Come on, we lived together for half a year, it’s not like you haven’t seen me naked before.”

In the time they lived together, Shion learned this about him: Nezumi was not ever careless or stupid in his actions. He was cautious, and very deliberate; he was doing this on purpose, and he meant something by it, but Shion couldn’t tell what. (Did Nezumi feel the same? Or was he only mocking him?)

“You can get your leg,” he mumbled, and forced himself to meet Nezumi’s challenge and look at him, naked and beautiful and grinning in triumph. Nezumi unwound the bindings on his right thigh and swung both feet into the half-full tub, then sat down fully in the water.

“Could you wash my hair, too? It’s hard to do that one-handed, and this left arm isn’t going anywhere without ripping the stitches out.”

“For some reason I get the feeling you’re taking advantage of my hospitality,” Shion griped, but he didn’t say no.

Nezumi kept his wounded leg elevated above the water line as the bathtub filled, then gingerly lowered it, hissing, “Fuck, the water’s too hot.”

“That’s your own fault. Besides, you’re not supposed to soak stitches anyway. You’re better off keeping it out of the water.”

“Have some sympathy, you tyrant. I’m clearly in too much pain to think properly.”

“You can’t be _too_ badly hurt if you’re still whining this much,” Shion said, and pressed a wet washcloth to the bullet hole on his chest before he could retaliate. But Nezumi clenched his eyes shut and grimaced for more than just theatrics this time, so Shion murmured “Sorry, sorry, I know it hurts, I’ll be fast,” as he gently rinsed out the wound with warm water, and did the same for the gash on his upper arm.

From there he moved on to the rest of Nezumi’s chest, running the washcloth over the dirt that had accumulated at the edges of the bindings. He rubbed over Nezumi’s sharp collarbones, too, though he didn’t need to, let himself linger longer than needed to just clean. Nezumi didn’t seem to mind, though: he relaxed into Shion’s touch with a small, almost imperceptible smile.

“Clean your leg, and then I can wash your hair.”

Nezumi took the washcloth from him and gave the bullet wound there the same treatment, and made a show of slowly scrubbing the cloth up and down both legs, ankles to knees to hips. Shion watched, entranced, throat dry. Nezumi shaved his legs for his role as Eve, and though he’d fallen behind in the wake of the Manhunt, they still looked soft and smooth. Shion felt the most absurd urge to lick the backs of his calves, kiss his inner knee, rub his face on the inside of his thighs. The sheer _want_ overwhelmed all logic and reason.

“Are you still going to wash my hair, or are you too busy ogling?” Nezumi said dryly. Shion sputtered and whipped his gaze away.

“Shut up. I was just waiting for you to be done.”

“Of course you were.”

Shion retaliated by pulling Nezumi down into the water by his hair. He yelped in shock but hadn’t the time to resist and splashed _kerplunk_ backwards into the tub, water sloshing over the sides and soaking the knees of Shion’s pants where he kneeled on the slicked tile.

“You – you _ass_ ,” Nezumi said as he rose up wraith-like from the deep, dripping and bristling like a wet cat, “Why must you always fight dirty?”

“At least I didn’t bite you. _This_ time.”

“Is that a threat or a promise?”

He considered for a moment. “Both.”

“...You can be really scary when you want to, you know that?”

Shion made sure to show all his teeth when he grinned. “I learned from the best.”

“Nah. It’s not just my influence. You were always a creepy kid.”

“Is this about when I gave you stitches the first time? You’re still hung up about that?”

“Of course. It was a very memorable face, I think you underestimate that. Heh, I bet you looked just as twisted when you stitched me up this time in - ” he cut himself off in realization, suddenly looking guilty. He sank back down into the water and looked away.

“In the Correctional Facility,” Shion finished for him, quietly. Nezumi refused to meet his eyes. “I don’t think I did, actually. I was mostly busy trying not to panic and not to cry. I was so afraid, Nezumi. I thought I was going to lose you too.”

Absently, he ran his fingers through Nezumi’s dark hair floating, billowing underwater like ink, or blood. Silence bled between them, interrupted only by the gentle dripping and ripples of water from Shion’s wrists.

“...Sorry,” Nezumi said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean...”

“I know you didn’t. It’s okay. Now sit up, I need to shampoo your hair.”

For once, Nezumi did as he was told without a fight. Shion lathered his hands with shampoo and smoothed it into Nezumi’s hair from the ends up to his roots. When he scratched his fingernails into Nezumi’s scalp, Nezumi sighed quietly and leaned into his touch. “You’re good at this.”

“It’s not too different from washing dogs.”

“Jeeze, you have to ruin every compliment I give you, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Shion tugged his hair again – gently this time – and coaxed him backward until the back of his head was submerged. He was slow about rinsing Nezumi’s hair, because Nezumi enjoyed the touch and Shion had an excuse, because he wasn’t ready to stop touching him yet.

“I was afraid, too.”

“Huh?”

“I was afraid. Of losing you,” Nezumi admitted with his eyes closed and hair floating around his face a dark halo. “That’s why I took that bullet. I didn’t even have to think about it, my body moved on its own. I couldn’t let you be killed because of me. You have a promise to keep, to Safu, to the city. You promised to kill the old city to save the new one, and ensure it never becomes a monster again. Only you can do that. I couldn’t, I _hate_ this place and I always will. I can’t build anything new, I can only destroy. If one of us had to die, it had to be me. I don’t have any place here.”

“How can you say that?” Shion said, all at once very brittle and cold. Grief rose in his chest – he had yet to truly grieve for Safu, _Safu_ – he pushed the feelings back, he swallowed the pain and boxed it up to feel later when the hurt was not so fresh he could taste it still, rotten on his tongue. “Neither of us should have died there, and neither of us did. I thought you wanted to see what No. 6 would become.”

“I do. I never said I didn’t.” He shook his mane of hair briskly underwater and pulled away from Shion’s grasping hands. “Never mind that now. I need to get out of the bath, my toes are pruning up.”

Conversation decidedly over, he stood up, water cascading down his skin scrubbed clean and pink. He wrapped a towel around his hips, then scowled at the heap of dirty clothes on the wet tile floor. “Can I borrow some clothes?”

Shion’s extra pair of slacks fit okay at Nezumi’s waist but were too short and left half his shins uncovered – “I’m still taller than you.”

“Don’t rub it in. No need to be so rude to your gracious host.”

He sat Nezumi down on the end of the bed and sat behind him with a leg to either of Nezumi’s sides so they were spooned front to back. Shion had taken the first aid kit from under the bathroom sink and arranged what was needed on the bedspread, and Nezumi half-turned to partially face him and give Shion access to the bullet hole that almost killed him. Gently, Shion applied a medicated gauze square onto the entry wound – Nezumi hissed through clenched teeth and his shoulders tensed, Shion saying “Sorry, sorry,” – and then began wrapping the bandages to hold the gauze in place, hyperaware of the radiant warmth of Nezumi’s skin, the minute movements of tense muscles in his neck and back, the accelerated pace of his heart.

When Shion finished wrapping and fastened the bandages in place, he paused. The graze scar sat atop Nezumi’s left shoulder, pale white raised skin in fine lines like railroad tracks along the old lines of the stitches. Shion’s first touch on Nezumi’s skin left that mark, burned it into him like the ragged spider eating up his lower back. Two of the spider’s spindly legs and some of its web of ruined tissue crawled above the fresh bandaging deep red, the same color as Shion’s snake scar.

Shion flashed back to the pain of his scar when it was first branded onto his skin, and when he thought of Nezumi, four years old and very small with the pain of the Massacre forever branded on his back, pain lanced through his heart and Shion closed both arms around Nezumi’s shoulders to his chest and leaned into him, held him. He nestled the side of his face into the crux of Nezumi’s neck and kissed the graze scar on impulse.

Nezumi did not pull away. He sighed, low and slow and shaking, and leaned back into the security of Shion’s hold. “You’re really weird. A real natural. It’s a miracle you’ve managed to survive this long.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Nezumi’s heartbeat evened out until it matched Shion’s own thudding against his back. The irregularity of the burn scars stood out on his otherwise smooth skin; Shion felt the raised tissue against his chest through the fabric of his shirt. The bullet entry wound was less than a hand’s length away from Nezumi’s heart – Shion had been so close to losing him. But Nezumi was warm and breathing and alive, and Shion said, “Thank you for being strong. Thank you for surviving, and meeting me.”

Nezumi was alive. Nezumi was alive, and Shion was alive, and Safu was not, and Shion would have all the rest of his life to feel that awful, gaping emptiness and loss – for now, Shion held Nezumi, and held him close.

Nezumi said nothing, but he did not push Shion away, and that was enough.

 .   .   .

The next time Shion replaced Nezumi’s bandages, he held him close again. He kissed the stitched scar on Nezumi’s shoulder that first stitched them together and when he dragged his tongue along the seam, Nezumi gasped and called his name, “ _Shion_.”

“Your voice is so beautiful,” Shion whispered hot against the shell of Nezumi’s ear. “Let me hear you, Nezumi.”

Shion closed his lips onto the side of Nezumi’s neck, teeth pressed lightly into his skin, tongue pressed against his shuddering pulse point. Nezumi tilted his head farther back to allow Shion better access and moaned loud enough the vibrations reverberated inside Shion’s mouth. “Shionnnn...” He swallowed heavily, hands clamped over Shion’s rested snug on Nezumi’s hips. His fingers clenched with each lick, little half-moon marks from his dull fingernails clawed into Shion’s wrists.

“I want to touch you more...may I, Nezumi?” Slowly, Shion slid his palms up Nezumi’s bare un-bandaged torso, over each indent of his abdominal muscles on his flat stomach, over each visible rib and the shallow dips between them. Nezumi moaned again, encouraging, when Shion skittered nervous fingertips across his upper chest. He gripped Shion’s wrists tighter. 

_Please,_ Shion,” Nezumi begged, and there was no stronger aphrodisiac in the world. Shion kissed where his jawbone arced below his ear and just that made Nezumi whine and writhe _._ Nezumi’s voice rose in pitch when he was aroused, his breathing shallowed and quickened with his heart, he trembled and shook up the bowed length of his spine. He surrendered control like Shion had never seen him do before – all for him, all because of Shion’s hands and mouth on him. “You fucking _tease_ ,” Nezumi hissed as he shifted up into Shion’s lap. “Quit fooling around.”

“You like it.” Shion scraped his teeth down Nezumi’s neck to the juncture of his shoulder and bit down. He slid his hands down the smooth skin and hard muscle of Nezumi’s sides and stopped at his hipbones to grip tight, tight as Nezumi’s white-knuckled grip where his hands still rode on Shion’s wrists.

He was so warm. Everywhere their skin touched burned and melted away, fusing them together. There were too many clothes between them, Shion dressed completely in a long-sleeve button-up and slacks and Nezumi only in his underwear but still not naked enough. He could probably slough all his skin off, shed muscles and everything else down to bare bone and he would not be naked enough for this, for how close Shion wanted him, how much he wanted to touch him, he wanted Nezumi wearing nothing but his soul and he wanted to touch and claim all of him. Shion _wanted_ with a greed, a hunger he’d not known possible. Nezumi was so beautiful.

“Shion, _fuck_ – move – your fucking – _hands_ ,” Nezumi said between quick, desperate breaths stuttered like machinegun fire. He tugged on Shion’s wrists until Shion relented and moved with him, and Nezumi moved both hands to the front of his boxers. He was even warmer, there, and –

Abruptly, Shion woke up, disoriented and still unbearably turned on. Nezumi lay on his side asleep on the bed beside him, his back pressed flush against Shion’s front. Shion was still hard.

_Oh no, oh no oh no oh no_. Nezumi in his dream had been warm but nothing like this, his body heat seeped through his thin sleep clothes and kissed Shion’s skin already painted hot red from shame and arousal. Shion wanted – wanted to pin Nezumi beneath him, wanted -

But Nezumi was asleep and unaware and Shion wrenched himself away, trembling. In his dream, Nezumi wanted him. In his dream, Nezumi grinded back into his lap and moaned from the feel of him. He flinched at the memory – how he wanted –

This Nezumi, the _real_ Nezumi, was not a dream, had not given consent, and Shion would rather die than hurt him, especially like this. _I’m terrible,_ he thought, gritting his teeth. _How selfish to use Nezumi like that._

_How selfish that I_ still _want to use him._

From the darkness, low and growling and horrible, Nezumi spoke: “Enjoying yourself?”

Shion’s stomach dropped to his knees.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted, all too loud, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I was dreaming and I didn’t realize and I’m so sorry - ” Guilt choked him and he trailed off into a cringe at his useless, stupid words. _Please don’t be hurt. Please don’t hate me._

“Hey,” Nezumi said softly. The covers rustled as he shifted and rolled over to face Shion in the dark. “Don’t worry about it. Happens to everyone.” He smiled. He was – soft, sincere. Sentimental like he never showed when the sun was up.

“You were sleeping,” Shion said, wretchedly. “You were sleeping, and I still...”

“You were sleeping too, right? I know you wouldn’t mess with me while I was sleeping on purpose. You’re not like that.” The overwhelming fondness in Nezumi’s expression hurt to look at, but Shion could not look away. “And besides, it’s my fault, right? Sleeping so close to you, and you are a _guy_ , after all. Can’t be helped.” His eyes flicked down to where Shion was still shamefully, painfully hard, and said, “Want some help?”

Shion closed his eyes to escape the intensity of Nezumi’s stare. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t _have_ to. Maybe I _want_ to.”

His eyes shot open again as Shion gaped. He said nothing, deer-in-the-headlights dumbstruck into silence. I’m still dreaming, he thought. Nezumi was silent, still watching, solemn and hesitant. “Okay,” Shion said.

Nezumi reached out. He was slow, cautious, tentative. He moved like he was underwater, on the riverbed with the smooth and colorful stones where it was peaceful and safe. Shion did not mind sharing this dream with him, just the two of them together at the bottom of the river. [2]

Nezumi brushed his fingertips against Shion’s inner thigh in question, then he slid his hand up farther to run along the waistband of Shion’s pajama pants. Then he reached inside them.

Moonlight filtered through the shuttered blinds in thin slats of light across Nezumi’s face. In the dark his eyes were thin outlines of grey moons in full eclipse by wide, mesmerized pupils, sparkling and wet, vulnerable. He licked his lips and those were also wet, and pink even in the grayscale of night, his face flushed, his breathing heavy.

And it was no different from what Shion did to himself in the shower – but this was _different_ , Shion gasped and curled his whole body into the sensation in a trembling crescent moon, this was _Nezumi_ touching him with his slender fingers and he touched with purpose and skill. Fantasies had nothing on the reality of Nezumi’s warm, elegant hand, Nezumi’s stilted breathing and hot breaths puffed across his face intermingled with his own soft sounds and “That’s it, Shion, you’re so good like this, so - ”

All at once, Shion tensed, every nerve relayed pleasure in rolling waves, like water, like an ocean. The tide rushed in and overwhelmed him and with a tremulous moan Shion came in rough jerking thrusts into Nezumi’s hand.

His vision cut out from the force of orgasm, and when he could see again he saw Nezumi watching him raptly with nothing short of wonder. “That was really something,” he said, hoarse. His lower lip was red and swollen where his front teeth had bitten down and chewed.

Body still buzzing from afterglow, Shion said, “Let me do the same for you.” He fluttered with nervous butterflies from his bold words, but he wanted – wanted Nezumi to feel everything he felt, the incredible tingling warmth and airy weightlessness and trembling aftershocks of pleasure. He wanted to do that to him, draw it out of Nezumi with his own body like he had in his dream, like Nezumi had so effortlessly done for him.

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I want to.”

Nezumi flushed further and flicked his gaze away. “You don’t understand. I mean, you really don’t need to.”

Shion almost protested but then understanding dawned. “You came...just from that? From watching?”

“Shut up.” The tips of Nezumi’s nose and ears bloomed bright red. “It was sexy. _You_ were sexy.”

And Shion realized he’d never thought of Nezumi as a sexual creature. He’d thought of him sexually, through dreams, guilty fantasies fueled by the rare times Nezumi wasn’t secretive or quiet enough about jacking off, but previously he’d never wondered what Nezumi thought about when he touched himself, who and what he found attractive. He had difficulty thinking of Nezumi being sexual with anyone, he never let anyone touch him and he avoided other people.

But Nezumi could kiss a prostitute into blushing and bring Shion easily to orgasm with a few lazy strokes of his hand. His experience and skills came from somewhere, but suddenly Shion knew he did not want to know, not yet, he did not want to pull that darkness into the room that smelled like Nezumi and sex, did not want the pain in Nezumi’s past to settle between them in the safe embrace of their shared bed. Selfishly, he craved ignorance. He wasn’t ready to know what he already on some level knew, wasn’t ready to hear Nezumi speak it aloud and give it shape and form. Not that night. Not yet. Think about instead –

Nezumi found _him_ attractive, though. Fresh heat washed over Shion as he realized Nezumi might think about him while masturbating, that before Shion woke up Nezumi listened to his pillow-muffled moans and and he did not move away, he remained aligned to Shion, biting his lip, breathing hard, bearing it. Enjoying it, maybe.

His thoughts were much more sophisticated. What he said was, “You think I’m sexy?”

Nezumi huffed a sigh and rolled over to face away, the line of his shoulders tense. “Go back to sleep, Shion.” The moment was over - his spikes were out again.

Shion shuffled closer to Nezumi’s back until close enough he felt the heat radiating off him. _(Living people are warm, right, Nezumi?)_ Carefully, he reached one arm over the low dip of Nezumi’s waist and let it rest there. He moved the flat of his palm up to Nezumi’s chest and laid it over his heart.

After a time, Nezumi’s hand joined his and he laced their fingers together. Shion slept soundly the rest of the night.

.   .   .

In the morning, Nezumi said nothing of what happened in the dark the night before. Maybe it had all been a dream, but it was vivid enough to give Shion pause. The memory of Nezumi’s hand on him burned strong, and when Nezumi woke first (as always) he ran a hasty load of laundry including his sleep clothes and refused a straight answer as to why he was using the washing machine at seven in the morning. Whatever happened, Nezumi was not ready to talk about it, so Shion did not push him. Nezumi would reach his own decisions in his own time.

Something changed between them. Something shifted with the changing of the seasons, on the precipice of spring, on the cusp of sunlight and the returning green in the trees. Nezumi grew warmer with the warming air, he aligned himself to the changing axis of the sun in the sky. He smiled more. He came back to life with the early chorus of birdsong, like he was suddenly awake after a long winter. [2]

Spring is a time of inbetweens and spring was the precipice of what they were and what they were to become. Maybe, with the wall gone, the wall between them would fall as well. Maybe Nezumi would let Shion kiss him – not goodbye, this time, but hello, or good morning, or an honest goodnight. Maybe Nezumi would kiss him in return. Maybe they would kiss for no reason other than to kiss, because they wanted to kiss, because it felt right and tasted sweet and their bodies fit together like two halves of a whole.

Sometimes Nezumi held Shion’s hand under the table, or knocked their ankles together. Sometimes he’d run his hand through Shion’s hair for no reason and with no explanation. Some mornings Shion would wake up with Nezumi nestled close against his side with his arms around him, smiling in his sleep.

This was right. This was how it should be. Shion believed that with every fiber of his soul and body. Whatever this metamorphosis created of them, that would remain true: they belonged together like springtime and rain, like sunlight and new leaves. They made each other happy.

_This is where my heart is._

Nezumi stole his heart, and it would be okay if he never returned it. Even if nothing else came of this – even if they remained on this ledge forever, so close to becoming something more but never taking that final step – _this_ , whatever was between them, was worthwhile.

So Shion did not rush him. This was enough, having Nezumi in his life and by his side, seeing Nezumi’s smile and feeling the warmth of his body. That was all he wanted.

Even if the winter never ended. Even if true spring never came. Let this transition last forever. Because for all Nezumi slept closer to Shion, he watched the horizon, too, the distance in his eyes an ominous storm.

Some nights Shion woke up and Nezumi wasn’t there. One night, he didn’t return.

Nezumi’s side of the bed was still warm from residual body heat – he had not been gone long. The window was open.

With spring still oncoming in the final stretch between winter and warmth, cold air chilled the bedroom from the draft through the open window. Shion wrapped his blanket around his shoulders like a cloak and stood up out of bed, cringing when his bare feet hit the cold wood floor. “Nezumi?” he asked.

“I’m here.”

Shion peeked his head out the window but saw no one on the patio. “Where?”

“Up here, Your Grace.”

Shion looked up: Nezumi’s long legs dangled above Shion’s head, toes almost touching Shion’s hair. “Sitting on the roof? Really? There is a patio, you know.”

“Patios are boring.”

Shion rolled his eyes and sighed, but he was smiling. “You call _me_ the weird one.” Nezumi shifted, and peered down at him with his trademark smirk, a little lopsided, a little wry.

He reached down. “Want a hand up?”

The wind outside was strong and sharp with cold, and Shion clasped Nezumi’s hand surely in his own without hesitation. He held on for balance as he clambered out of the window and onto the narrow ledge of the sill, then Nezumi hauled him up onto the flat roof to sit next to him on the edge, their sides lined up comfortably and touching from their ankles up to their shoulders. “I brought a blanket,” Shion said and unwrapped it from himself enough to cocoon Nezumi in it too.

Nezumi mumbled a thanks and curled the edge of the blanket fully around his back and over to seal in the front with Shion’s loose end. Under the blanket their hands brushed together by chance, and held.

The wind kept the night sky clear of clouds. The moon already set, the stars glittered unhindered from the dark river of space like polished stones underwater. “It’s a good night for this.”

“It’d be nicer if it weren’t so cold and windy.”

“The wind is why we can see so many stars, though. And I’m not cold if I’m with you.”

Shion glanced to his side to watch Nezumi watching the stars; even in the dark his eyes burned with radiant light, first-magnitude stars. His lips moved soundlessly: _living people are warm._

Shion tried his luck. “When I woke up and you were gone, I thought you left.”

Nezumi didn’t look at him, gave no inclination he heard Shion’s confession. Enough time passed Shion thought he would never respond, but then he said “I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. And I wouldn’t lie about it, either. I’m not like you.”

His words were cruel but not unwarranted, and Shion flinched at the memory. And marveled that, all these months later, Nezumi still hurt from that betrayal; the thorns in his words tore up his own throat and voice to a pained rasp. He held that much power over Nezumi’s heart, and it terrified him: they both knew too well from the fall of No. 6 that power corrupts.

_I never want to hurt you again._

“Do you know much astronomy?” Nezumi suddenly asked. A distraction to avoid any talk of emotions, clumsy and obvious so unlike his usual unreadable mask, but Shion let it pass, let Nezumi pretend he didn’t care. Nezumi kept his line of sight heavenward and Shion saw reflected in his eyes the silver starlight, his soul shining out through the molten grey ripped open and vulnerable and exposed to all the universe, his soul and body and all his components born of stardust.

“It wasn’t my focus, but I learned some things about it when I was about to go into the Advanced Track. There’s connections to ecology in that everything in the universe is composed of the same matter, and all living creatures on earth have all the same base elements as stars, hydrogen and oxygen and - ”

“Yeah, I know all that,” Nezumi cut him off dismissively. “I didn’t ask you for an entire lecture.”

“What were you asking for, then?”

“I was just curious whether you did or not, but I should know better by now than to expect a simple yes or no answer from you. Besides, I was more thinking about constellations.”

“Oh. No, not really, maybe a little from mythology references in some of your books, but not a lot. Do you?”

“Some. More than you, at least. I had a book of old star charts somewhere in the underground room. I was just thinking about it and wishing I had it with me now.”

He seemed on the brink of something – about to tell a story, offer an explanation – so Shion waited for him to speak, but he did not.

_I want you to teach me about the stars_ , Shion thought desperately, _give me an entire lecture about the stories written there. Tell me about Cassiopeia and Polaris, the star who wanders and the star who stands still._

_I want you to_ talk _to me._

“Why did you come up here, Nezumi?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Figured this was a better way to spend the time than lying awake in the dark for hours, staring at the stunning view of the back of your head.”

“I supposed this is more interesting,” Shion said, tried to keep his tone light to match the false ease of Nezumi’s voice, but he couldn’t keep his worry from leaking through. Nezumi finally spared him a questioning sidelong glance, so he said, “You had another nightmare, didn’t you.”

Nezumi looked to the sky, his silence answer enough.

“They’re getting worse. Mine are, too. You don’t need to hide it.”

“I’m not hiding anything.”

_Liar._ When Nezumi woke up from a nightmare, he would push Shion away, pretend he was still asleep. He was quiet but his breathing was wrong, sharp and pained. Sometimes he cried in his sleep and grimaced at the dried tears still streaked down his cheeks come morning.

Before the Correctional Facility when they’d lived together in the West Block, Nezumi’s nightmares never made him cry, at least not that Shion saw. He didn’t thrash as violently or tremble as much, and he was rarely loud and restless enough to wake Shion up, instead of now waking him almost every night.

His control was slipping. Some dam in his heart finally collapsed under the weight of the hurt he carried. And Shion shared some of that hurt now, they had traveled to hell together and made it back alive. They shared the same nightmares now - _so let me help you, Nezumi. Let me carry it like I carried you. You don’t need to suffer this alone._

“In my dreams, you die,” Shion said, and it hurt to say as the memory hurt like knives under his tongue. “We’re back in the Correctional Facility when it’s burning down around us, in the hall where you took a bullet for me, or the infirmary where I pulled it out of you, and you – you don’t stop _bleeding_ , you die in my arms, again and again every night. We escaped, we survived, but part of me is still trapped there. We burned that hellhole down together, but in my dreams, it’s still standing, and I still lose you.”

(Let this not be prophecy. I don’t want to suffer alone too.)

Their hands still entwined, Nezumi lifted Shion’s up and towards himself and delicately laid the flat of Shion’s palm over his heart. He did not look at Shion, but he said, “I’m alive, and I’m here.” His sleep shirt was warm from contact with his skin, like the empty bedspread retained the warmth of him after he’d left. Nezumi’s heartbeat fluttered as bird’s wings beat in a panic, wild birds trapped in his skeletal cage.

_You’re warm and alive, but are you really_ here, _Nezumi? Or are you already far away, somewhere I can’t follow?_

_We’re closer than we’ve ever been, but still so far apart._

This is what it means to fall in love with something feral: they will claw at you and fight against your hold with all the terror and ferocity of a drowning swimmer fighting against the waves, they will bite deep into the bones of your hand when you set the bones of their broken wings in a splint; and when you have come to love them for all their beauty and selfish, careless cruelty, and when they have learned that your presence brings warmth and food and a kind of comfort, when their wounds are healed and you pull their bandaging away, they will shake out their feathers and outstretch their mended wings and fly away without a single glance back. And you will be left with the scars and the memories and the emptiness of the loss, and you will wait every spring for their return, for just one last glance, one last embrace.

_Kiss him,_ Shion thought, _steal his soul through his mouth the way he captured yours in the grey of his eyes_. But Nezumi still looked at the sky, and not at him, so he did not.

“In my dreams, you kill me.”

“What?”

“Exactly like I said.” Nezumi pulled Shion’s hand away from his heart and shifted uncomfortably on his perch. “My nightmares are all about you. You stroke your fingers down my neck and then you grab on and squeeze until it snaps. You hold a hand over my nose and mouth so I can’t breathe and hold me down and suffocate me. You cut me open with a scalpel and rip all my guts out.”

He spoke so nonchalant, unconcerned, like a mild comment on the weather, like such horror was inevitable. This was the inside of Nezumi’s head. This was the form his demons took: red eyes and white hair, a man-eating serpent that swallowed him whole.

Shion felt sick. “I would never - ”

“Don’t sound so offended, I know you wouldn’t,” he snapped irritably, and let go of Shion’s hand altogether. “But...that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about it. Part of me is...afraid.” He slumped, wilted into himself. His end of the blanket slipped off his shame-bowed shoulders.

Nezumi was so strong that Shion forgot, sometimes, the fragility of his heart, the animal fear there. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not actually your fault. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I must have done _something_ wrong, if your dreams are like this - ”

“I said it’s _not your fault!_ ” Finally, Nezumi looked at him, his eyes wild and dangerous and flashing like a thunderstorm. Good – let him be angry, let him be _Nezumi_ , Shion loved him all, even the knife’s edge of his talons. “I didn’t tell you to make you feel guilty. Cut it out.”

“Why did you tell me, then?” He reached for Nezumi’s hand again to tether him down. Nezumi’s fingers skittered nervously across the rooftop, but did not pull away.

Nezumi faced away again and did not answer. And Shion saw beneath the starlight Nezumi’s profile turned away in silhouette, the ragged edges of his superfibre trailed behind him tattered wings in the breeze, an omen.

_You’re like the swallow._

The swallow always meant to leave. He stayed the winter over, for his Prince’s sake, and died of the cold. The swallow was in love and he died for love, for his Prince and for their shared loneliness. [3]

_You’re the opposite, though. It’s the springtime you fear, the blossoming of whatever it is between us. The sun’s warmth will melt the ice that guards your fragile heart._

_You’re a lost bird of paradise blown into my life by a storm, by chance or by fate, I still don’t know. But somehow you survived the winter here._

_I don’t want you to die. But I don’t want you to_ leave, _either_.

(Was it selfish of him? Maybe, but love is selfish, as much as it is unconditional. Shion loved and Shion _wanted_.)

He roughly pulled Nezumi’s hand to his own heart. This is yours, he thought helplessly, this is yours, so _talk to me._ “Nezumi, why?”

_Why won’t you talk to me? Why are you afraid?_

_What are you afraid of?_

Shion held tight to Nezumi, their fingers laced intimately together, but Nezumi slips through his hands like water. “You already know, don’t you? I can’t stay.”

Shion breathed, slowly in and out, he breathed, and he breathed, and he breathed, and he breathed to ensure he was still breathing, still alive as his world crumbled and his sky fell around him. “Stay,” he choked out,  “I want you to stay. I want to be by your side. That’s all I want.” He shuddered like some frail thing caught on the wind and fell into Nezumi, tucked his face into the side of Nezumi’s neck and gasped in cold breaths of the scent of his hair and skin, held their linked hands close to the vulnerable hollow where his heart beat and curled tight against Nezumi as if he held on tight enough their bodies would melt together, and Nezumi would not leave.

“I know. I know you do.” Like a tender goodbye, Nezumi held him, threaded his other hand through the spun silk of Shion’s hair. He bowed his head and kissed his Prince’s crown.

Stay, Shion thought. Stay.

But words cannot halt the changing of the seasons, and Nezumi was a force of nature like any other.

Nezumi unfurled his wings.

.   .   .

When he left, Nezumi kissed Shion the way Shion had always wanted to be kissed by him. Tender, passionate, and fierce: Nezumi’s tongue in his mouth, their lips sliding together wet and hot and smooth; Nezumi’s hand cupping his chin, then his cheek, then clawing at his hair, other arm coiled low and snakelike around his waist as close against him as a scar. Nezumi gripped him so close their bones knocked together and ached from the harsh contact. He was warm, everywhere they touched was warm and they were touching everywhere, Nezumi’s white-knuckled grip on a hipbone, the sharp edge of his teeth nipping at Shion’s lips, their legs interlocking and fronts aligned chest to chest. Shion cried, his tears wet on their faces and between their wet lips, Nezumi breathing heavily like he was trying to breathe him in with his stilted, desperate gasps and swallowed words of remorse. Nezumi tasted like _leaving_ , and he was gone before he pulled away.

_Reunion will come_.

Nezumi swore to him it was a kiss to seal a vow, a promise to reunite.

So why did it feel so much like goodbye?

When Nezumi left, he did not look back. Was it callousness, or cowardice? Would he have lost the will to leave had he looked back at all he was leaving, and the tears in Shion’s eyes? Shion did not know. The north star of his moral compass was gone and he did not know what he believed.

The first time he returned, alone, to their underground room, Shion sifted through the stacks of books until he found the book of constellations Nezumi had spoken of. He carried it with him back to the bakery and that night he tucked the book under his arm and climbed out the window to the roof by himself.

Shion sat alone in the cold and dark reading by moonlight until his fingers were too numb from windchill to turn the pages of the book. He opened his eyes to all the universe until his eyes burned and tried to take it all in, every distant pinprick of burning light, tried to understand just this small stretch of sky stretched out above him and the once-demon city it was his task to tame. On the edge of the night, slowly rising to the ceiling of the world, he found Lyra.

Orpheus looked back, and lost everything. Nezumi twice traveled to hell and back and made it back alive: maybe he took his cue from there.

And so Shion waited, and he waited, and he waited until he was certain that waiting would kill him. He woke up every morning with his arms and legs splayed across to the other side of the bed seeking warmth no longer there, he fell asleep each night to the choking quiet of a single heart beating where once there were two. He drowned himself in his work, and that was how it felt: drowning, drowning at the bottom of the river between Vega and Altair, dragged down below the surface by the nightmares in the river’s depths.

Shion waited. Some days he hurt too much to think about Nezumi. Some days he hurt too much to think about anything else. When Nezumi left he took a part of Shion with him, he ripped it away from him down along his seams and left him unraveled and torn apart. Nezumi had been right: attachments were dangerous. Being attached meant partings tore you in two. They were attached as one, and they parted, but the cut wasn’t clean, the tear frayed at the edges and ripped away uneven and ragged with pieces missing and pieces left behind. Nezumi stole a part of Shion and took it with him; had Shion been left with any of Nezumi at all in return?

If Shion still had any claim over Nezumi’s heart, he couldn’t feel it. He felt like he had nothing left of him. Shion moved all of Nezumi’s books into his residence in No. 6 to keep them safe, but the sight and smell of them only served as reminders of Nezumi’s absence. Shion reread books obsessively, then less and less, and then not at all.

_I was in love with you,_ he admitted to the underground room the last time he visited, cleared of books, bereft of life. Dark and cold as the river. _I still am. I’m in love with you. You can laugh at me, insult my vocabulary, but it’s the truth._

_This hurts too much for it to be anything else._

He was prepared for Nezumi to hurt him. Hurt was inevitable when you fell in love with something feral. Sometimes Nezumi didn’t know how _not_ to hurt him, hurt was so much of how Nezumi interpreted the world, and Shion was okay with that. But Nezumi leaving was a different brand of hurt – the hurt of missing limbs, phantom pains. The hurt of absence, emptiness, the dull ache of being alone.

_I miss you like I’d miss an amputated limb, a lost tooth, a faded scar. I miss you because once, you were a part of me, and you’re not anymore, but you still_ are _, if only through your absence._

He’d rather take a knife to the throat.

A year passed, then two, then three. Shion clung to hope and longing like a lifeboat. He refused to believe Nezumi would leave him, adrift and alone, after everything: they were not strangers. They never were strangers. Nezumi would return. Nezumi kept his promises.

Time passed. Everything changed. Shion did not forget. He remembered, and memory weighed him down as iron manacles on his wrists, cement blocks on his feet. This was why Nezumi had wanted to remain unattached: this was _torture_.

His 20th birthday, eight years to the day from their first meeting, Shion stayed awake all night by his open bedroom window to close the circle. But it didn’t rain, and Nezumi wasn’t there, it was a clear warm night, and Shion called in sick to work the following day.

Shion closed the window.

Four years passed. Shion mourned for Nezumi as if he were dead, and he may as well be – alive or not, he was out of Shion’s life, existing only in memories. (And still his memories did not fade, they burned still bright and strong, and it was both a comfort and a curse.)

He never fell out of love. The hurt ebbed and flowed, but the love remained as strong as ever, a beacon, and Shion resigned himself to spending the rest of his life in love with Nezumi, even if they never again crossed paths. He slept around, he dated, but all of it was loveless, and sometimes he wondered if he was even capable of loving anyone else. Maybe he would learn how, in time, just as he learned how to live without Nezumi by his side (a half-life, living with a missing lung, half a heart, but he’s alive, he’s still breathing.)

The fifth spring after Nezumi left him alone on a hill at the mercy of the wind and sun, Shion came to terms with the fact that Nezumi was not coming back. Shion never doubted that he’d meant to, but Nezumi – for all his charm and cunning and mystery – was only human. He was imperfect. He ran away, and maybe Shion hated him a little for that.

_Did you ever love me, Nezumi? I think you did. I think you fell in love, and that scared you, so you ran. And I’m trying to forgive you but I don’t know if I ever will. I was in love with you. I still am. And when you left, you hurt me more than I’ve ever been hurt, and probably more than anyone will ever hurt me again. I love you. I’ll always, always love you._

_But I need to move on with my life._

.   .   .

Four days after Shion’s 22nd birthday, someone knocked at his window.

 .   .   .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> endnotes: end chapter 2, ~9000 words. Next chapter is a long one and because of that I have no idea when it will be posted – all this is setting the stage for a rocky reunion. Nezumi kind of fucked it up big time with how long he stayed away, but more about that next chapter. Both Shion and Nezumi’s motives will be explained more later, I promise! There’s rhyme and reason behind Nezumi being especially stupid and Shion growing so disillusioned, so please don’t give up on me for ending this chapter so cruelly!
> 
>  
> 
> [1] In reference to Shion’s dream in the second chapter of No. 6 Beyond
> 
> [2] “suddenly awake after a long winter” lifted from the alt text of a softer world comic #661, apologies to e horne and j comeau
> 
> [3] From The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. There’s a reason this story is specifically mentioned in the canon – Nezumi and Shion are in many ways a direct homage


	3. NOT A FULL CHAPTER YET! BUT IT’S SOMETHING

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> local author emerges from the swamp after three-year absence and doesn't even have a full chapter to show for it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Haha wow what’s up guys, anyone still reading this? It’s the genuine Shion experience of waiting literal years for reunion to come! I’m all about the realism, clearly! 
> 
> In the three years since the last update: I moved three times in eight months, I fell in love (!), I totaled my car on a busy interstate in the middle of moving, I was homeless for three weeks, I had to rehome my dog, I got engaged (!!!), my mom had a cancer scare, and I somehow managed to graduate college. I did not forget about this fic, and I have not given up on it, but I’ve been so exhausted that my writing has suffered significantly. Trying to write academically for my last year of college was like trying to swim through molasses and also the molasses is on fire. 
> 
> My original outline for chapter 3 turned into a BEAST so I decided to split it into four parts so I’d finally be able to update this damn thing. I have about 12k written for the next update, but it’s not complete and it all still needs editing. However, I’d feel too rude to update this and have nothing to show for it but this sad little author’s note, so here’s an EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEAK of Nezumi hanging out alone in the wilderness reminiscing and being bad at having feelings. It’s not much but it’s something. It’s a start.
> 
> WARNINGS: Nezumi gets a gory intrusive thought for three paragraphs, between 'You are my weakness' and “Nezumi? Why did you stop?”

 

 

Memory is fickle. Nezumi’s memories from before the old woman’s murder were mercurial and hazy, riddled with holes. There were empty spaces in his heart, gaps in the road of neural circuitry. Dark caverns. Memories he didn’t remember, blacked out and blocked from access. Sometimes they came back to him in his sleep. Sometimes they stalked him during the day – the phantom stink of burning bodies overwhelming him when he tended the fuel in the furnace; when Shion touched a hand to Nezumi’s neck and all he could feel was the stranglehold of a larger hand clenched around his windpipe, a strange man’s clammy fingers on his hip and _I’m going to die, I’m going to die here._

And some memories existed only as the absence of memory, lost forever; still others remained crystallized in perfect frozen fragments sharp and cold, shrapnel from the fallout lodged forever in his skin. He was never sure what of his memories were real, and what were imagined or improvised. Memories came back strongest as dreams too detailed to be real.

Before the fall of No. 6, Nezumi dreamed about fire. He still did, sometimes. He carried that fire with him always. But since leaving No.6, the ghosts from Mao more often came gentle, bringing birdsong instead of the roar of flames. Gentle ghosts were still ghosts, though, and still unwelcome. The dead should stay buried. The past should stay in the past.

_Shion should stay in the past._

Nezumi grimaced. So it was going to be one of _those_ days, where Shion intruded on all his other thoughts whether they were about him or not. Shion haunted Nezumi as stubbornly as any of his other ghosts.

Nezumi dreamed about him, too, when he wasn’t dreaming about Mao, or sometimes Nezumi dreamed the impossibility that he had both. He didn’t dream about Shion killing him, not anymore, not since the first year away. A small mercy, when the nightmares that lingered were of Shion being the one to die – those were far worse.

Shion dreams were never gentle. Even the nice ones, even the ones where he kissed Nezumi, even the ones where they were happy. There is nothing gentle about the ghost of what was never meant to be.

Nezumi remembered Shion. He remembered everything about him. Nezumi could not remember his father’s face or his mother’s voice, he’d forgotten almost all the words of his first language, but he remembered the exact shape of Shion’s smile, the taste of his tongue, how he liked his coffee and the rhythm of his breathing when he was deep in sleep. The distance spanned between them was twelve hundred miles and five years apart, and Nezumi remembered.

He sighed, slow and measured. He’d long since given up holding it in. He’d been unable to keep any of his other promises to the old woman anyway, and she was long dead and Nezumi entirely alone so what did it matter? Nezumi was weak and so he traveled to where there was no one to bear witness to his weakness, so it didn’t matter, nothing mattered at all.

He sat up from his makeshift bed, a sleeping bag on bare dirt, and pulled his pack closer to unzip the smallest pocket, where he kept his most shameful transgression –

Three weeks into Shion’s stay in the West Block, he came to Nezumi with a legendary case of bedhead and asked, “Can you cut my hair? When it gets this long it does, well, this.”

Nezumi laughed, an inelegant snort. “What makes you think I know how to cut hair?”

“You cut your own, right? Either that or someone else cuts it for you, and you could just bring me to them.”

He scoffed. “As if I’d blow money on something that frivolous. Yeah, I cut mine, but that doesn’t mean I know how to cut yours without making it an even worse mess. There’s a big difference between giving someone else a haircut and hacking your own hair off with a knife when it gets long enough to tie up.”

Shion stepped closer, directly in Nezumi’s face, and reached his hand out to run his fingers along the shorter hair at the back of Nezumi’s head, too fast for Nezumi to react except to shiver full-bodied at the touch and hold his breath. “Is that really how you do it? It always looks so good!”

“Don’t try to flatter me.” Regaining his bearings, Nezumi batted Shion’s arm away with a scowl to mask the ever-conflicting  _fear_ and _want_ he felt still. His scalp tingled everywhere Shion had touched.

“I’m not. I mean it.” Shion remained dangerously close, and completely oblivious, unrattled and genuine. “Would you cut my hair? I think you’d do fine. It’s such a pain when it’s like this, it’s either all over the place unmanageable or it’s getting in my eyes.”

_“You’re_ a pain,” Nezumi griped, turning to the side and walking away. “Fine, I’ll try so you’ll quit being so pathetic, but you better not whine at me if I fuck it up.”

From the corner of his eye, Nezumi caught the edge of Shion’s obnoxiously bright smile and was thankful he was already on the other side of the room and no longer exposed to that radiation up close where it could kill him, or at least impair his judgment further. Shion’s smiles were dangerous – he was most beautiful smiling. Looking at him was like staring at the goddamn sun.

The first aid kit Nezumi stole from Chronos contained a pair of scissors deemed appropriate for the task. Shion cleared an empty space on the floor (Shion was forever cleaning up clutter and Nezumi forever filling it back in again) and pulled the chair over while Nezumi found the scissors and readied his superfibre cloak as a drape. Shion sat, and Nezumi wrapped him in the silver fabric of the cloak, securely fastened around his neck.

“Here goes. Don’t talk, I need to concentrate.”

Shion obeyed, for once, and remained blessedly silent throughout the duration. Not much outside noise save the wind made it underground to their basement room, so in the quiet the only sounds were the slow _snip, snip_ of the scissors, and their breathing, which seemed louder in the absence of words.

Shion’s hair was soft and supple as Nezumi combed his fingers through the translucent strands. He could forget himself, if he wasn’t careful, forget the notion of a haircut altogether and forego the scissors and instead fill hours with only the simple, repetitive touch of stroking Shion’s hair. It would not be the first time he’d surrendered to the impulse to touch. Whenever Nezumi slipped and reached for him, Shion held his tongue and his questions, aware from experience that questions would be met only with hostility and Nezumi’s hasty retreat.

_You are my weakness._

The thought came to Nezumi sudden and uninvited, as it often did - _I should kill him._ The twin blades of the scissors were sharp poised against Shion’s delicate neck, which he’d left defenseless with his back turned. His jugular and carotid arteries at the front of his throat were easy targets only inches from where the scissors clipped away the shaggy hairs down his nape. What an idiot, what kind of idiot leaves his neck unguarded? Nezumi could end this fool’s errand in seconds with one well-aimed slice.

Shion would bleed out before he realized what was happening. It would be the most humane course of action, kill Shion before he had to watch his beloved city burn or before he became Nezumi’s enemy to defend it. It would be fast. He’d spill blood on Nezumi’s superfibre, on the clumps of white hair on the floor, all down his white undershirt. Shion would gargle desperately for breath through the tear in his windpipe and the scissors would gleam liquid red in the soft light of the kerosene lanterns.

It would be easy. Nezumi had done it before, many times before, why else would he wrap his superfibre at his neck? Killing Shion would be no different from any other kill. He’d bleed until he stopped breathing, and Nezumi would sing for his soul, and Shion’s eyes wide open and staring would haunt Nezumi’s nightmares with all the rest of his ghosts.

“Nezumi? Why did you stop?”

Nezumi’s wrist twitched. Had the scissors still been clipping he might have taken Shion’s ear off with the motion. _Idiot._ “It’s called thinking. You should try it sometime. And what did I say about talking?”

This close to Shion’s throat, Nezumi could see his heart beating at the pulse point on the side of his neck – still beating steady, all his blood on the inside where it belonged. His own heart thundered and shook in response. He didn’t want to kill Shion. He didn’t want to kill. Before he resumed, he smoothed one hand down Shion’s nape and lingered at the top of his spine. _Sorry,_ he thought, _Sorry, Shion. I’m not being fair. You haven’t done anything wrong._

Somewhere along the course of his life, Nezumi forgot how to be human. Somewhere, he traded his childhood for fangs, his human heart for claws. He didn’t want to kill Shion. He didn’t want to even _think_ about killing him, his stomach twisting in tight sickened knots at the bloody scene still played on repeat in his head.

It was not that Nezumi wanted to kill, but that he knew how. He knew the weak points where the blood flowed, he knew them from a lifetime eking out a living by the cutting edge of a blade. Killing came to him as natural as breathing.

Shion was close enough to him that Nezumi felt the warmth of his skin, and with every other experience with other people, that was too close, they were close because they meant to hurt him. Other humans were more dangerous than fire and closeness meant being burned.

(Sometimes Nezumi frightened himself. Sometimes he’s afraid he’s too far gone, too much become that which he hates most. He hadn’t always been a killer, had he? He’d been a child, once. He’d been someone else. But –

Memory is fickle. Nezumi could no longer remember who he was before he was a rat. Maybe Nezumi had killed him, too. “He who fights monsters” and all that. Nietzsche, eat your heart out.)

Shion didn’t see it that way, though. Shion reached out for Nezumi like that was something people did and survived to tell the tale, and for some unknown reason, Nezumi let him. Shion was different, content to touch without taking, and so stupidly _trusting_ with his back to Nezumi and throat bared to a blade without a hint of caution. Nezumi called it naiveté because anything else – anything closer to the truth – would be terrifying. What was a person like Nezumi meant to do with the trust of a person like Shion?

“There. Good as it’s gonna get, I’m afraid. No bitching about it.”

“I’m sure it’s fine.” Shion shook his head and shook off the last errant hairs clumped on his shoulders. “And if it’s not, it’s no great loss, you’re about the only one who sees it anyway and even if it’s bad enough for you to mock, you won’t, because you’d only be mocking yourself.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh.”

“More or less.” He smiled cheeky over his shoulder and unwrapped the superfibre, the last trimmings falling to the floor. “And also. I’ve never spent money on ‘frivolous’ haircuts before, either. My mom always cut my hair for me.”

Shion wielded his words like a challenge; he always picked the most inconsequential hills to die on. Nezumi could unfairly and untruthfully belittle Shion’s intelligence over and over to complete agreement only for Shion to take issue with Nezumi’s badmouthing of chimpanzees, or assuming someone other than his mama cut his hair. Nezumi would never, ever understand him.

“Always? Even before I came in and ruined your life?”

Shion’s smile dropped away and he dropped into silence. He looked to the floor, then back at Nezumi’s eyes with his own eyes more serious than Nezumi had been with his self-deprecating joke. “Please stop saying things like that,” he said softly, “You never ruined my life, you _saved_ it. The only thing ruined was an illusion. And if anyone ruined anything, it was me. I was the one who chose to help you, but you never chose to need help. I chose to help you, and you chose to trust me. I don’t blame you for any of that. I never have.”

Nezumi never knew how to respond when Shion talked about that night. With his soft words and soft eyes, Shion was making himself more vulnerable than he had been with the blade at his throat moments before, and he meant to drag Nezumi down with him. Nezumi dealt better with the unyielding bite of knives, predictable violence with a clear agenda. The sticky sentimentality of soft words melted past all of Nezumi’s defenses, everything he knew how to survive, poisoned him from the inside out. Knives were easy. Knives don’t lie. Knives give pain and pain only. Words can flatter you first, push your heart into your throat, lead you into ruin.

“And besides. Even when I lived in Chronos and we could afford otherwise, my mom cut my hair. So there.”

“All right, jeeze, no need to bite my head off. Now are you going to go see what your new hairdo looks like or are you going to continue lecturing me?” Nezumi pretended to busy himself with shaking out the superfibre so he would not have to look at Shion, who still looked at Nezumi like he was twelve years old and bleeding to death in the rain.

_You’re wrong, Shion. Back then, I never chose to trust you – I didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t about trust. It was about desperation. It was about survival.  
_

_I almost killed you. If it would have kept me alive, I would have, and I would have never known the difference. We’re not the same. I’m not as good a person as you think I am._

When Shion was on the other side of the room to see his haircut in the mirror, Nezumi picked up one of the longer locks of hair from the floor and, shamefully, pocketed it. He never told Shion, and he never managed to cast it away. When he left, he took the clipping with him, held it tight in his closed fist to give himself the courage to not look back – if he looked back at Shion and his tears, he would lose the will to leave.

_Let me be brave. Let me be strong. Let me be the person Shion thinks I am._

Five years later and Nezumi carried it with him still, and was still no closer to that goal. He remained as much a coward as he’d ever been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> endnotes: That’s all for now. Don’t know when I’ll have a real update, I’m currently between jobs and that’s taking up all my time and energy, but I promise I’m still working on this, writer’s block be damned. Have faith in me like Shion has in Nezumi! Chapter 3 will come! 
> 
> P.S. Nezumi definitely gets his own hair touched up by someone at the theater afterwards. Shion’s haircut is probably terrible, but Nezumi loves it anyway, and so does Shion (it’s the thought that counts.) 
> 
> P.S.P.S. Friendly reminder that most intrusive thoughts reflect your greatest fears. Someone find this boy a therapist.


End file.
